Services troubles in Vista.

[Skuller]

Hi,
Client has returned from a trip with the story that the Vista laptop ceased
to access the internet during the last 2 days.

HP laptop
O/S: Vista Home Basic.

Local Admin and Domain Admin accounts enabled and members of the Local
Admins.
Everything -was- running smoothly previously:

Current issues:
Network will not connect - error shows that "Diagnostic policy service" is
not running..
Trying to start the following services give the following errors:

Error 5: Access is denied
- Diagnostic policy service
- Base filtering engine
- DHCP Client
- Windows Time

Error 1068: the dependancy group or service failed to start
- IKE AuthIP IPSec Keying Modules
- IPsec Policy Agent
- network list service


Error 1073741288
- Network location awareness

So the question arises, What went wrong, How did it go wrong, and how to fix
it, short of a complete re-install ?

Open to all suggestions.